SLALOM (2020): "Hot [French] Adolescent Hormones" | Hormones Chaud [Français] Adolescent

Here’s part of the, somewhat misleading, Movie Info for Slalom (2022) from Rotten Tomatoes:

This riveting, Cannes-selected #MeToo drama from debut filmmaker Charlène Favier follows the relationship between a teenage ski prodigy and her predatory instructor [...] In a breakthrough role, Noée Abita plays 15-year-old Lyz, a high school student in the French Alps who has been accepted to an elite ski club known for producing some of the country's top professional athletes. Taking a chance on his new recruit, ex-champion turned coach Fred decides to mold Lyz into his shining star despite her lack of experience. Under his influence, she will have to endure more than the physical and emotional pressure of the training. Will Lyz's determination help her escape Fred's exploitative grip?

The last sentence is misleading, because, on the contrary, Lyz wanted to be even further in her coach’s grip. 

In the French film, shortly after we’re shown the first of five scenes with Lyz in her (sports) bra and panties (#theallureofnymphets), Lyz happened upon Fred, her ski coach, showering. Lyz stared at her nude coach for ≈ ten (10) seconds before she walked in the other direction. Consequently, Lyz asked Justine, another teen ski club member, “Ever slept with a guy?” Justine replied, “Yeah. Well, No. I blew Max in the restroom. I hated it.”

After Lyz won her first ski tournament, coach Fred took her on a joy ride before he kissed her, informed her, “Look what you do to me,” placed Lyz’s hand on his penis, put his hand on Lyz’s hand, and masturbated until orgasm. Lyz toyed with her coach’s semen until he gave her a rag from the van. 

Subsequently, at Lyz’s victory dinner, Lyz placed her hand on her coaches hand and asked, “You won’t let me down?”

Due to declining grades and Lyz’s mother having to work far away in Marseille, Lyz moved in with coach Fred and his wife -  Lilou.  Shortly thereafter, Lyz asked Lilou, “How long have you been with Fred?”

It’s common for age-gap content to be coupled with (mainstream) teen lipstick lesbian content; thus, it’s no surprise that a topless Justine attempted to kiss Lyz in the locker room.

Lyz, “What are you doing?”
Justine, “What would you say if it were [coach] Fred?”
Lyz, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I interest Fred just because I win races. But it’s a first for me. It means he believes in me. I like that. To hell with the rest."

As we see, Lyz feared that coach Fred's “interest” was only due to her superior skiing skills. In other words, she feared that he was only attracted to her sexually due to her skills on the slopes. Nonetheless, she liked the individual attention and was like, “To hell with the rest.” Consequently, coach Fred took Lyz’s virginity in the ski resort’s weight room. 

Referring to a box of Plan-B, Lyz asked the pharmacist, “How much is it? Intriguingly, he replied, “It’s free for minors.” (#really)

Unsurprisingly, Lilou suspected that her husband and Lyz were having an age-gap affair. 

Coach Fred, “What’s your problem?”
Lilou, “She’s 15. You’re with her every day. On weekends, too.”
Coach Fred, “[…] Are you jealous?”

Later, with tears in her eyes, Lilou confronted Lyz about the potential skier-ski coach affair. Unconvincingly, Lyz replied, “We’ve done nothing.“

Later, to Lyz’s dismay, coach Fred informed her, “I’m not your boyfriend. I’m your trainer. OK?” Lyz replied, “I want to stay with you forever. You said you wouldn’t let me down.” 

Consequently, to entice her coach to be more like her boyfriend, Lyz displayed her jeunes fountains. And following her coach's example, she took her coach's hand and attempted to place it on her spandex covered vagina. 

Unfortunately, for Lyz it didn’t work. She came to the realization that coach Fred was more concerned about her winning championships than their age-gap relationship. Consequently, after she won the skiing championship, Lyz left her coach, her age-gap affair and skiing career behind - presumably for good. 

Lastly, Slalom reminded me of You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession, which is about a tennis player-tennis coach relationship, Slalom was shown at the Festival de Cannes, and the film received a 100% Tomatometer score from 62 film credits. For example, Harvey S. Karten of Big Apple Reviews opined of Lyz: "Hot adolescent hormones against the cold and beautiful French Alps."

[TEEN] FEMALE CHAUVINIST PIGS: The Rise of Teen Oral Sex, Thongs & Girl-on-Girl?

Ariel Levy wrote in Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of [Teen] Raunch Culture that she first started to notice a rise in teen raunch culture around 2002 when she started seeing, among other raunchy concerns, teens: [...] wearing jeans cut so low they exposed what came to be known as butt cleavage paired with miniature tops [...] and pierced navels alike.”

Levy defined Male Chauvinist Pigs as “men who regarded women as pieces of meat”, while she defined Female Chauvinist Pigs as “women who make sex objects of other women and of themselves” (i.e., self-sexualization). 

In addition to Female Chauvinist Pigs, Levy coined the phrase “raunch feminism”, which is where “stripping is a valuable to elevating womankind as gaining an education” and where “[t]he basic requirements are hot girls and small garments.”

Levy related that Jenna Jameson, “the world’s highest grossing porn star”, wrote the best seller How to Make Love Like a Porn Star that was published by Judith Regan. Interestingly, Regan opined on CBS, “I believe that there is a porno-ization of the culture [...]” 

Levy gave an example of the “porno-ization of the culture” when she wrote about “Cardio Striptease” classes that were offered at Crunch gyms in big cities like New York, LA, and Chicago where students were encouraged “to attend their workout sessions in bras and thongs”. Provocatively, for her “sweet sixteen celebration”, a California nymphet and eight of her friends participated in a Cardio Striptease class. (Levy did not disclose if the nymphets wore bras and thongs.) 

Relatedly, Anne, a student at Head-Royce, a private school in the wealthy section of Oakland, shared: “[...] like my friend is having her eighteenth birthday party and she wants to have strippers there.”

The chapter most relevant to this blog is intriguingly titled “Pigs in Training”, which is in reference to teen Female Chauvinist Pigs (i.e., self-sexualized nymphets). 

[Note: As I’ve previously detailed what Levy wrote on Swiffer Girl, (i.e., Danielle Miller, a Horace Mann prep middle school student, who produced three (3) self-shot teen masturbating videos that prominently displayed a Swiffer broom.), I’ll avoid her here.]

Levy began the chapter with several examples of teen oral sex - including middle school school bus oral sex:

There’s a rumor going around that “rainbow parties” are the latest teen rage. Rainbow parties are good old-fashioned slumber parties, with a distinctly contemporary twist: All the girls in attendance put on a different color of lipstick, invite over one lucky boy, and then one by one they treat him to oral sex until voilà! His penis is a spectral color chart.

(This reminded me of a previous post where we related that Laura Sessions Stepp wrote in the article "Parents Are Alarmed by an Unsettling New Fad in Middle Schools: Oral Sex" (July 8, 1999) for the Washington Post that nymphets at Williamsburg Middle School, "a mostly upper-income community" in Arlington, Virginia, were performing oral sex at house parties and in parks.) 

In December 2002, a middle-school girl performed fellatio on the high school boy sitting next to her on the school bus in Kingston, Massachusetts, while their classmates watched. 

The same thing had happened with a pair of seventh-graders on a school bus back in 1999 in Talbot County, Maryland, where an eighth-grade girl also fellated her neighbor during a crowded study hall. 

These incidents may have inspired two thirteen-year-olds in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, who were suspended for engaging in a round of oral sex (her on him) in the back of a school bus during a spring field trip in 2004.

These examples hit home, because I know of a Manhattan public school teacher whom had a scandal in his freshman year science class. It happened the day after his students returned from a field trip when a schoolgirl learned that her boyfriend received oral sex from their classmate - on the school bus. 

~~~~~

In the novel Hummingbirds, Mr. Landry, the headmistress of Carmine-Casey - a Manhattan prep school, shared with Binhammer, an English teacher, that she: “[...] got a call from a parent just two weeks ago giving her ninth-grade daughter permission to leave school when her boyfriend, who is a freshman in college, came to pick her up in his car.”

And in an example of art imitating life, Alexa, who, at the time, was a junior at Oyster Bay High, shared with Levy that 7th graders were “hooking up or having sex” with high school seniors:

“In my school, what was very popular was seventh- or eighth- or ninth-grade girls hooking up or having sex, whatever, with junior and senior guys,” she said. “Parents kept calling the school, like, why is this senior at my house when my daughter is a freshman? They dressed so provocatively, the guys couldn’t really tell how old the girls were…all they see is a hot girl.”

Thus, it appears that those Oyster Bay High nymphets were practicing what Levy termed “raunch feminism” where : “The basic requirements are hot [teen] girls and small garments.”

Degrassi | Middle School Thong

Unsurprisingly, Levy wrote that “everybody” at Oyster Bay High shared with her that they wore teen thongs. And Levy related a story about a middle-school nymphet (“who was 12 or 13”) at Head-Royce whom: “[...] pulled up her shirt, pulled out the strap of her thong from under the side of her skirt, and snapped it [...]”!

In addition to performing oral sex (on school buses) and wearing thongs under small garments, it’s not unusual for nymphets to participate in lipstick lesbianism or what the previous owner of my copy of Female Chauvinist Pigs annotated as “bisexual appropriation”. 

Therefore, it’s not unanticipated that Levy described “girl-on-girl action at school dances”. For example, David and Anne, classmates at Head-Royce, shared with Levy that schoolgirls do live girl-on-girl scenes to “appeal to the guys” (i.e., for “a lot of attention…definitely”) :

An example, he said, would be all the lap dancing and girl-on-girl action at school dances. “There’s this whole stereotype, and it’s probably largely true, that guys kind of like two girls kissing each other. So you’ll see a guy sitting on a chair—at, you know, a high school dance—and two girls will just go up and give him this huge lap dance and start making out. [...] just doing it to appeal to the “guys…always trying to find this new way in to appeal to the guys.

One of David’s best female friends, Anne, agreed. “Definitely girls hook up with other girls because they know the guys will like it,” she said. “They think, Then the guys are going to want to hook up with me and give me a lot of attention…definitely. If they think a guy’s going to like it, they’ll do it.

But it appears that (some) teachers and schools, like at Dalton in Manhattan, may condone schoolgirl (oral) sex and even teen masturbation. For example, Peggy Cowan, the president of the New Jersey Physicians Group, related to Levy: “I heard of one woman teacher who tells kids how to masturbate. Explaining it! About fantasizing when you shower!” 

And we shared that Tamar Lewin posted in "Teen-Agers Alter Sexual Practices, Thinking Risks Will Be Avoided" (April 5, 1997) for the New York Times that at Hunter, a top high school on Manhattan's wealthy Upper East Side, provides "mint-flavored condoms with no spermicide, labeled ''ONLY for oral sex'' for the Hunter High nymphets.

In the end, Levy related that the behavior of teen Female Chauvinist Pigs is not always about getting attention. In some cases, nymphets are expressing their sexuality. Connectedly, Levy shared an anecdote about Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, which Levy referred to as a “groundbreaking collection of women’s sexual fantasies”. In terms of teens expressing their sexuality, here are three examples from My Secret Garden:

Clarissa shared that she remembers when she and her friend were caught masturbating with candles when they were 12.

Theda's first sexual fantasy started after she gazed upon her teacher's "rotund posterior" when she was about 7 or 8.  She wrote that she had "an infantile urge” to slide her hand “[…] down his bum cheeks and round to 'the front' [...]".

Alexandra fantasized about having an affair with her high school teacher. She stated emphatically, "[...] I'm sure it would not be a fantasy if I gave him a little encouragement."

Levy even shared that some of the same sexual fantasies she had when she was “very young” currently run through her bed: 

“Likewise, certain themes have run through my sexual fantasies since I was very young, just as they now run through my bed. Nobody had to teach me how to want these things, or how to get them.”

And the author shared that when she was a 17-year-old high school student, she visited Wesleyan, where, as part of her college tour, she was taken to a “Naked Party” that was decorated with a crepe paper penis and vagina. And Levy learned that at Wesleyan: “Group sex, to say nothing of casual sex, was *de rigueur.” Needless to say, Levy is an alumna of Wesleyan. But doesn’t Levy’s anecdote contradict her subtitle? Maybe there hasn’t been a [sharp] rise in teen raunch culture but rather a gradual continuation. 

*de ri·gueur | adjective: required by etiquette or current fashion. (Oxford Languages) [Emphasis added]

PRETTY LITTLE LIARS: A Student Teacher Sexual Affair Triangle | Alison, Aria & Mr. Fitz

On Pretty Little Liars, Aria and Mr. Ezra Fitz’s age-gap sexual affair may be the most famous (fictional) student-teacher affair in popular culture; however, before Ezria there was Ezrison - the age-gap affair between Alison DiLaurentis and Ezra. And just like with Aria, Ezra met Alison in a bar where, just like Aria, 15-year-old Alison lied about her age; however, unlike Ezria, viewers didn’t learn of Ezrison until season 4.

In “Turn of the Shoe” (s04e02), Tippi, a parrot, parroted “Hey Board Shorts, miss me?", which Tippi learned from Alison. Consequently, the Pretty Little Liars (PLL) learned that Alison had an affair with someone named Board Shorts. 

Alison DiLaurentis

In “Now You See Me, Now You Don't” (s04e12), Aria discovered a letter that revealed that Alison met Board Shorts in Rosewood. In the letter, Alison told Board Shorts that she was planning to take him to her parents' place on the seaside resort of Cape May for her 18th birthday. (Intriguingly, Higbee was the name of Alison’s favorite beach on Cape May, which IRL is a nudist beach.)

Of Rosewood, Alison wrote in the letter to Board Shorts: “It’s best kept secret was you. But you’re my best kept secret now. My friends wouldn’t understand [our age difference].”

Source: Analyzing A\Tumblr

In “Love ShAck, Baby” (s04e15) a PLL noticed an entry in Alison’s journal\dairy titled “Hot for Teacher”, which is also the title of a 1984 Van Halen song that is about a student who is “hot for teacher” . Here’s the text of the letter where Alison expresses her attraction to older men:

Hot for Teacher

I saw a teacher interviewing today with the principal. He was quite sexy. High school boys are gross, college guys are only looking for one thing, but older men, now they know what they want and take it all. He looked kind of bookish but in a cute way. I will get to know him eventually and to have a teacher on my side [...]

In ‘Bite Your Tongue’ s04e17, we learned, via a flashback, that Board Shorts liked to take Alison to The Hart and The Huntsman bar where, after Alison asked Board Shorts, “So, you think I’m mature enough?”, she sensually kissed him.

Alison & Ezra

Eventually, via journal slash diary entries (i.e., Hot for Teacher and The Hart and The Huntsman) and some investigative work, the PLLs discovered that Board Shorts was actually ≈ 22-year-old Ezra.

In “A is for Answers” (s04e24), Alison revealed to Aria that she first met Ezra in a pub that she used to “hangout a lot” in and that she told Ezra that she was a [freshman] at UPenn. (Of course, Alison chose UPenn, an Ivy League school, over Drexel, which would have been just as geographically accurate.)

In a flashback, Alison spied Ezra in the pub, sat next to him, ordered a “gin and tonic”, and foretold Ezra, “Sometimes lies are more interesting than the truth.” Alison went on to share with Aria that Ezra told her that she reminded him of Breakfast at Tiffany’s Holly Golightly and that he wanted her to be the muse for his writing. 

As Ezra was an English teacher and writer, it’s safe to assume that he was referring to Truman Capote's novella and not the film adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Of the novella, I related in The Allure of Nymphets that Holly Golightly married a much older man at the age of 13, she lived with a college jock at the age of 15, and at the age of 18, she proclaimed, “I can’t get excited by a man until he’s at least forty-two.”

And Ezra’s Alison slash Holly connection is a double entendre, which will be explored when we discuss Emison. 

Back from the flashback, Ezra exclaimed to Alison, 

“You lied to me.” “Look, it is one thing to make up stories [...] but to lie to a guy and say that you’re 21, when you’re [15 and] still in high school!”

(Note: “you’re 21” may be a Pretty Little Liars continuity error as Alison lied in the letter that she was 18.)

Alison replied, “What’s the big deal? [...]” ''[...] what are you so freaked out about?”

Ezra, “God help me, Alison. I actually like you. I just don’t want to see you get hurt.” 

Allison softly kissed Ezra on the cheek and said, “You’re an alright guy. See you around”

Very interestingly, later in the episode, Alison checked into the Lost Woods Resort under the alias Vivian Darkbloom, which is an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov - the author of Lolita.

If you agree with novelist Robertson Davies' assessment of Lolita, Alison’s use of Vivian Darkbloom as an alias is fitting. We shared in Nymphalis carmen: Nympholepsy in Nabokov’s Oeuvre that Davies opined that Lolita was: “[...] not [about] the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but [about] the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child.” And Donald Malcolm wrote in his New Yorker piece, “Lo, the Poor Nymphet”: “[...] it is Lolita who boldly, directly seduces him [i.e., Humbert]. 

In "EscApe From New York" (s05e01), Alison took the PLLs to the Fitzgerald Theater in Manhattan. Despite the theater’s “wow” factor, Alison told the PLLs that Ezra didn’t take Alison to the theater to impress her, but that the theater was his, “[...] kind of special place.”  

In a flashback at the theater, once again, Ezra reminded Alison that she was his Holly Golighty.

Upon the stage Alison said, “I could be an actress.”

Ezra, “Could be? Well, I hate to break it to you but you already are.” [...] “You really are my Holly Golighty.”

After Alison learned from Bill, the Fitzgerald Theater’s janitor, that Ezra was in fact a Fitzgerald, she shared with the PLLs that that was when she realized that Ezra was pretending to be poor. Consequently, Alison shared, “I actually like him more for that.” In addition, Alison confessed to the PLLs that she “stayed over a few times” at the theater. Rhetorical question: What was Alison and Ezra doing when she “stayed over a few times” at Ezra's “[...] kind of special place”?

In "Surfing the Aftershocks" s05e03, Alison briefly visited Ezra’s apartment  - only to return his manuscript, but Ezra wanted Alison to let Aria know that she had paid him a visit. One can confidently infer that that was not the only visit Alison made to Ezra’s place. 

Wait, but Ezra wasn’t Alison’s only age-gap affair. Remember when Alison said to Ezra, “What’s the big deal? [...]” ''[...]  what are you so freaked out about?” Well, I left out the part where Alison said, “We didn’t do anything.” That sentence was revealing, because it revealed that Ezra didn’t cause Alison’s teen pregnancy scare. It was Darren Wilden, a Rosewood police officer, who Alison referred to in her journal as Beach Hottie. That’s correct. 15-year-old Alison and 34-year-old Wilden had (unprotected) sex during Alison’s summer break on the romantic seaside resort of Cape May.

As a matter of fact, Alison shared in “Out of the Frying Pan, into the Inferno” (s03e17) that she and Beach Hottie had sex more than once. When asked, “You mean you weren’t using protection?” Alison replied, “We were. Just not all the time.”

Beach Hottie (Darren Wilden), Alison, & CeCe

The PLLs didn’t realize it, but during “Now You See Me, Now You Don't”, they saw a picture of Alison posing on a boat in Cape May with her hand around Beach Hottie’s waist. 

And when Alison was 14, she had an age-gap affair with (approximately) 25-year-old Ian Thomas. Some even considered it one of the hottest hookups in Pretty Little Liars history!

Shyla Watson wrote in her PopSugar post “39 of the Hottest Hookups in Pretty Little Liars History”: “Spencer [a PLL]  isn't the first younger girl who Ian dates in secret. While in a relationship with Melissa [Spencer’s older sister], Ian has a secret affair with a 14-year-old Alison.”

Intriguingly, some PLL fans theorized that Alison's Hot for Teacher journal entry was not written about Ezra but was written about Ian after Alison saw Ian interviewing for Rosewood High’s field hockey coaching position. After which, Alison had a sudden desire to learn how to play the sport. 

Lastly, let’s circle back to Ezra’s double entendre that Alison was his Holly Golightly. 

Rebecca Renner wrote in her The Paris Review post "Was Holly Golightly Bisexual?": "The name Holly Golightly is synonymous with sex and sophistication, but viewers may not know as much about her as they think." You can write that again. Renner then shared this relevant Holly quote from the novella:

“Of course people couldn’t help but think I must be a bit of a dyke myself. And of course I am [...] So what? That never discouraged a man yet, in fact it seems to goad them on.”

And this excerpt from a 1968 Truman Capote Playboy interview is revealing:

Playboy: “Was Holly a Lesbian?”

Capote: “Of course [...] but what intrigues me is the heterosexual male’s fascination with Lesbians.”

What does this have to do with Alison - you may ask? As often is the case with (fictional) teleiophiles, like, Holly, Alison was a lipstick lesbian too who gave Emily, her schoolmate and PLL, “practice kisses”. For example, in a “The Perfect Storm” (s01e09) flashback scene, after Alison read to Emily from Great Expectations, the nymphets kissed in Rosewood High’s library. Consequently, Alison wrote in her journal under the title Girl Crush:

So girl crush kissed me today. To be fair, I kissed her back and it was nice, but I definitely don’t have feelings for her in the way she has for me [...] I catch her staring at me in class [...]

In another flashback, in Rosewood’s locker room, Alison removed her towel, and while topless, she turned to face Emily before she asked Emily if she had seen her new French bra. “Do me a favor. Hook it for me, would you?” Emily obliged and hooked Alison’s French bra, rubbed Alison’s bare shoulder, and kissed Alison's damp neck, which prompted Alison to remind Emily, “Just because we kissed in the library Emily [...] A kiss is a kiss [...] if I’m kissing you it’s because it’s practice for the real thing.”

Alison & Emily

However, in “Miss Me × 100” (s05e05), Alison asked if she could stay in Emily’s bedroom, because her dad was working late, and she didn’t want to go home to an empty house. In addition, Alison informed Emily, “Those kisses just weren’t for practice.” After Emily confirmed with her mom that it was okay for Alison to spend the night, while in bed, Emily aked, “Ali? Are you asleep?” Subsequently, the teens kissed passionately. And fans assumed that they had lipstick lesbian sex! Interestingly, this teen lesbian sex scene was cut from to a student-teacher sex scene with a topless, and presumed bottomless, Aria in the cowgirl position astride Ezra.

There you have it, Alison was a teleiophile who had her first age-gap affair at 14 when she had unprotected sex, multiple times, with an over 30-year-old police officer, and she was a lipstick lesbian. Yet, this raises some questions: Why did the Pretty Little Liars writers make Alison have three age-gap relationships when she had zero in the novels? And why were there multiple references to nympholepsy in the series?  The allure of nymphets.

Jenny Popach: TikTok’s Sexualized Teen Problem Child

By Olivia Carville posted on BloombergBusinessweek “TikTok’s Problem Child Has 7 Million Followers and One Proud Mom: Young creators like Jenny Popach are posting suggestively sexual content, sometimes with parental approval, leaving moderators and executives unsure what to do.”

In the piece, Carville wrote that 16-year-old TikTok sensation and “bona fide influencer” Jenny Popach takes advantage of the allure of a nymphet by posting “hypersexual” TikToks such as twerking in string bikinis and teasing men with her jailbait status, which has calculatedly amassed her a (small) fortune:

Arritola is one of TikTok’s most controversial teen stars, with 7 million followers. Her popularity stems in part from hypersexual posts—what she describes as “shock-value content”—in which she twerks in string bikinis, body rolls in hot pants or drops innuendo in captions (“When men can go to jail for being with you”). In the past year, fashion brands eager to capitalize on her sex appeal have paid her a small fortune to wear their clothes.

Carville posted that Jenny’s a “problem child” for TikTok’s trust and safety team, because “[...] she’s posting content so risqué that the trust and safety team doesn’t seem to know what to do with her.” Consequently, TikTok has “[...] received a flood of complaints about Arritola’s videos, [and] her account was [temporarily] deactivated [three times] for violating its community guidelines.”

TikTok’s Problem Child: Jenny Popach

Carville shared that the TikTok account of a nymphet under 18 can be (temporarily) banned for participating in sexual activities, wearing minimal clothing, lip-syncing to sexually explicit songs, twerking, breast shaking, and pelvic thrusting.

When Jenny’s TikTok account was deactivated, she re-started her FanFix account - “an app where creators can make money sending exclusive pictures and messages to fans.” Jenny offered “[...] pictures and private chats with fans who pay $15 a month for a subscription.” Unsurprisingly, the nymphet earned $23,000 before returning to TikTok.

Carville wrote that “[...] moderating teenage content is so complex that it verges on the impossible,” because, despite the fact that TikTok removed over 80 million videos for violating child-safety rules in the first half of 2022, a whopping “20 billion clips were uploaded during that time”.

The Dark Side of TikTok: TeenTok

Carville related that TikTok’s algorithm rewards salacious posts like teens twerking in string bikinis “by promoting them on its For You landing page”. Consequently, the allure of nymphets has helped TikTok go from a valuation of $10 billion in 2016 to $300 billion today. Relatedly, Carville said in the BloombergBusinessweek documentary The Dark Side of TikTok: TeenTok, “Teenage TikTok is big business.”

The article didn’t mention if Jenny makes additional money via teen TikTok livestreams, but Carville did mention that TikTok team members suggested that TikTok “[...] include a five-second delay, enough time for at least some artificial intelligence moderation. Instead, livestreaming was rolled out without the delay.”

Maria Ulacia, Jenny’s mother, is not “pimping her out” and she “[...] has no qualms about Arritola’s social media stardom.” Of Jenny's rise as an influencer that started when Jenny was 10, Ulacia shared, “We loved it. We loved the attention.” Of her daughter's sexualized teen TikToks, Ulacia said, “We post videos that contain shock value to attract viewers and attention - giving the audience something to talk about.”

Of her mother, Jenny shared in The Dark Side of TikTok: TeenTok that most of the ideas for her most "shocking" videos came from her mother: 

“My mom is the girl, she’s my mom, by best friend, my sister, everything, my partner in this, and so she basically gives me ideas, if I don’t have any, she’ll give me a type of video to make. Sometimes she even buys my outfits and she’s the one that takes me to film most of my videos. Most of my videos that I’ve done with my mother are my most shocking videos.”

Unsurprisingly, Jenny confessed in the documentary that she wants her most salacious videos to go viral: 

“The content that does the best for me, I feel like is spontaneous, those are always great, or shock value [...] Make sure something shocking is happening that people will just like ‘[say] wait, let me take a double take’ [...] and wanna send it to their friends and want everybody else to see it."

Consequently, “[Jenny] Arritola has brand deals with Fashion Nova, PrettyLittleThing and Shein. She just launched a clothing line with Empty Soda and has recently been posing in a pink miniskirt-and-crop-top set with a heart-shaped cutout on the chest, encouraging her followers to buy it.”

Piper Rockelle

Of course, Ulacia isn’t the only mother using the allure of her nymphet daughter to make (a lot) of money. Carville wrote that “[o]ther mother-run accounts of preteen girls have encouraged followers to pay for photographs of the children in bikinis.” And Tiffany Smith, the mother of 15-year-old influencer Piper Rockelle, allegedly “[...] once mailed a pair of her daughter’s used underwear to a fan for money.”

Lastly, we learned from Carville’s piece that, this past summer, Jenny purchased a black Mercedes-Benz with $20,000 in cash and posted a TikTok “[...] from a car wash wearing a skintight bodysuit and white-heeled boots. In it, she lathers herself in foam, washes the car hood with her chest and winks at the camera.” Jenny said, “If you don’t have haters, you ain’t poppin’.”

KEEP THIS BETWEEN US (2022): High School Student-Teacher Sexual Affair(s)

The fascinating thing about age-gap memoirs and documentaries is that they’re typically filled with (revealing) contractions. Keep This Between Us (2022), a Freeform/Hulu documentary, is no different. And IMDb’s synopsis is leading. “Follow's one woman's journey [i.e., Cheryl Nichols] as she reexamines her past relationship with a trusted teacher [i.e., Jason Meyers].” [Emphasis added]

Very interestingly, in the first episode of the four part series, Cheryl admitted that she was at fault, but not “totally”, for having an age-gap affair with her married high school teacher.

“I have something to get over that wasn’t totally my fault. Remembering that I was just this person for years that was just constantly focusing all of their energy on this, you know, one person and trying to give all their love and all of their support to this one person. I don’t really know what the difference is between having that with a guy who was your teacher in high school and who is much older than you, and having that with, you know, boyfriends your own age, because I didn’t really have that.” 

But minutes later, in the, seemingly, first contradiction, Cheryl said that she did not have a share in the responsibility for the illicit affair, because, when the affair began, she was a 16-year-old “child”.

“For so many years, I did not even have the language to speak about this. I didn’t have the words. I started to recognize that I wasn’t responsible for this, that I was a child. I didn’t think that being a 16-year-old person was a child [...]”

However, Cheryl admitted that at 16, she was old enough to be obsessed and in love - with her married teacher. So much so that the affair continued after she went to college at University of Utah. 

“Like, I fell in love with my teacher when I was 16. And then I went to college and I was still with this guy.”

However, Cheryl didn’t live on campus. Shockingly, she lived off campus with her teacher and his wife! We learned in episode 3 that she told her parents, “I don’t need to live in the dorms, I can live, you know, in the basement of the theater teacher [i.e., her teacher’s wife].” 

Why did Cheryl move in with her (former) high school teacher? Cheryl said, “[...] I felt like I owed it to him to at least show up and give the relationship a try and that kind of meant without conditions.” Consequently, Cheryl lost her virginity to her married roommate - in the basement. And subsequently, she wrote in her journal: “[...] I know in my heart that he loves me.” 

Cheryl posited that she was trapped and groomed into the student-teacher affair and elaborated on how her teacher did it, which was that he “implanted” things in her head:

• Cheryl’s teacher implanted in her head that she was intelligent
• Cheryl’s teacher implanted in her head that she possessed a “special thing”
• Cheryl’s teacher constantly reminded her of that “special thing” (e.g., You're so full of energy. You’re so alive.)
• Cheryl’s teacher “turned his light on” her (e.g., through poetry) and consequently validated her

“I never had anybody care that I was intelligent before. He was really great at finding the special thing about a person and constantly reminding them that that made them special. When he turned his light on me, I felt like I was suddenly, not just seen, but I was validated by this person who everybody believed was great. I just didn’t know that it was gonna be a trap.”

Rhetorical questions: 

Could any teacher use these techniques to initiate an illicit affair with a schoolgirl? In other words, by using these implanting techniques, could even your most charmless and (subjectively) unattractive teacher miraculously become charming and attractive by, say, telling a schoolgirl that she’s intelligent.  

Or does the teacher have to be attractive? In other words, does implanting only work if the schoolgirl is already attracted to the teacher? Wait, but feminists and teen boys would argue that it’s utterly impossible for a schoolgirl to be organically attracted to any teacher. 

In addition, we learned in episode 1 that, feeling validated and excited, Cheryl would visit her teacher’s classroom after school - a lot. And there would be flirting.

“I would get excited about going into his class after school.” 

“I spent a lot of time in his classroom going to poetry and we started getting really close. Like there would be these flirtatious moments [...]”

Interestingly, out of all the implanting techniques Cheryl’s teacher used, it was his use of poetry that made Cheryl “push everything to the side” and make her affair with her teacher her “priority”.

“It was over for me after that poem [“Frustration”], like, I was done. It doesn’t matter what this costs me, I will be part of this relationship.” 

But later Cheryl said that the affair was not consensual: “It was not a consensual relationship - it was like I was being completely taken advantage of.” #confused

Anyway, after being touched by the poem, 16-year-old Cheryl went to her teacher’s house with some friends. While watching a movie, Cheryl’s friends left, one-by-one, but she stayed, and after her teacher’s wife left the room, Cheryl and her teacher kissed - for the first time. 

It turns out that Cheryl's burgeoning affair with her teacher was no secret. For example, Josh Pierson, Cheryl’s male friend from school, shared that he knew that Cheryl and their teacher were “hanging out and in a relationship”. Katie Hall, another former classmate, shared that she knew at the time that the relationship was “inappropriate in the sense that they were too close - that it made everybody uncomfortable.”

Interestingly, towards the beginning of episode 2, Cheryl admitted that she knew that (some of) her classmates were aware of her student-teacher affair, but, interestingly, she placed (some of) the blame on them for the illicit affair. And she wanted them to take accountability? “A lot of people who looked the other way then still refuse to take accountability for their actions now.” Wait, what? 

But Kat Salerno said that after she confronted Cherly about the affair, “She denied it. Straight away, denied it.” Cheryl retorted, “People are blowing it out of proportion.” Even Though, Kat confronted Cheryl about the affair, Cheryl claimed in episode 3, “I didn’t have any friends who were able to say, ‘This is weird, Cheryl. This is weird. This is not normal.” 

Cheryl said that, “For years I had convinced myself that I was making this choice to be with him, that I was the one that needed to accept the consequences. But now, there’s no doubt in my mind that he was in control of this.” And remember when Cheryl said that, “It was not a consensual relationship - it was like I was being completely taken advantage of.” 

Well, Brandi Preas, another former classmate, shared that it appeared that Cheryl was not being taken advantage of, because it appeared that it was Cheryl who was influential over her teacher, that it was Cheryl, à la Kathryn Merteuil in Cruel Intentions 2, who was “calling the shots'' in the age-gap affair, and that Cheryl was “just so in love” with her teacher. And Daniel Penalloza said that some of their classmates opined that, “Cheryl was looking for attention.”

Brandi Preas, “I had issues with, you know, wanting to come forward because my anger towards you was awful. I hated you. I wanted nothing to do with you. I blamed you [...] I saw your attachment to each other. I could see how he was favoring you. We felt like you never got bad directions. You always got the part. Most people assumed you had the influence over him. And you were calling the shots in a lot of ways [...] I mean. If I were to act it out, I’d be like, ‘She’s just so in love with him. It’s gross.’ 

Kat Salerno, another former classmate, erroneously said that their classmates blamed Cheryl for the affair, “[...] because women get blamed for man’s actions all the time.” This is obviously not true - especially as it relates to student-teacher affairs as teachers are, almost always, (openly) blamed.

In yet another seeming contradiction, after Cheryl admitted that “But of course, all of the kids in school were talking about it [i.e., her student-teacher affair],” Cheryl shared an old journal entry where she wrote that the affair made her “happy” but that the “suspicious minds” on campus made her sad and weak, but they were trying to ruin the “fun” she was having with her teacher, that she was happy, and that the only way to be happy was through her age-gap affair. 

And it appears that Cheryl wasn’t the only student having an affair with a teacher, because Cheryl shared, “Like, people [i.e., her schoolmates] would joke about students having sex with their teachers like it was funny.”

Cheryl’s journal entry:

“It is hard to decipher my current feeling. I’m happy because of the events that have taken place - yet sad that some have too. Suspicious minds make me weak.They sit in their houses with picket fences and laugh at me. I just get so angry. Why do they always ruin our fun? I just want to be happy. I just want to keep the smile. The only way I can is through him.”

Surprisingly, Cheryl related that she considered her teacher her boyfriend and that she was convinced that he loved her because, for their love, he was willing to get fired.

“I just wanted to be with him. I wanted to feel, in those little concentrated periods of time, that I was with my boyfriend. Like, I saw him as my boyfriend. And in my mind, he was the one who had everything on the line. He was risking his entire life for me. It made me feel so special. It made me feel so important to know that if somebody found out about us, like, he could get fired. Why would he do that unless he loved me?”

Unsurprisingly, word of Cheryl’s affair with her teacher reached the principal and the counselor. After the principal asked Cheryl, “Are you involved in a sexual relationship with the teacher?” Cheryl replied, “No.” But then Cheryl blamed the school’s administration for sliding the affair “right under the rug”! However, it’s not surprising that Cheryl denied the affair, because she opined that the principal and the counselor were just two more “suspicious minds” 

Provocatively, Cheryl, not only avidly read “Nabokov and Henry Miller and Anais Nin” in high school, but she was “obsessed” with Lolita, and Cheryl used to compare herself to the famous nymphet. “Like Lolita. I was, like, obsessed with it [...] I guess I used to, like, compare myself to Lolita sometimes.”  

We knew that Cheryl’s affair with her teacher began when she was 16, but we learned in episode 3 that it lasted almost about six years! Thus, it’s no surprise that Cheryl admitted that the affair was consensual but she qualified it with a reminder that she was “implanted” (i.e., groomed) before she agreed to the affair. 

“We stayed together until I was 22. The grooming led to what some people would say, was like, a consensual relationship.”

Cheryl said that her desire to move to L.A. gave her the strength to leave the age-gap relationship, but that doesn’t appear to be true or, at least, the only reason. “I’m in Los Angeles now. My desire to get out of Little Elm, it’s the reason that I had the strength to pull myself out of that relationship.”

Just like Vanessa Springora in Le Consentement (Consent) and Maggie in Three Women, the “real turning point” in the affair began after Cheryl found out that there were other nymphets, because after her teacher’s wife found out about her husband’s affair with Cheryl, Cheryl learned that her older lover was fired from his high school teaching position due to, “[...] an inappropriate email relationship with a student”. 

And after Cheryl shared with Heaven Rubin, “I was in a relationship with him [i.e., Meyers] and it started when I was in high school. It started when I was 16.” Heaven replied, “Me too.” Cheryl cried, “Sorry.” 

In episode 4, we learned a bit more about Heaven’s teacher-student affair with Meyers of which Cheryl said, “I’m just tying myself into knots about this.” After Meyers kissed Heaven, in class, their student-teacher sex included, “[...] instances of fellatio, cunnilingus and sexual intercourse inside the classroom - behind the closed door [...]” 

And talk about a double plot twist! It was not until 17-year-old Heaven learned that she was not the only schoolgirl of Jason Meyers did she have a turning point in their affair. 

The question remains, Why did Cheryl make Keep This Between Us? Well, she confessed that she wanted Meyers to “admit it” or acknowledge their student-teacher affair, because she wanted to believe that “he’s good”. It really bothered Cheryl that Meyers wouldn’t acknowledge their age-gap relationship. Cheryl said, “When I started out doing this documentary, I had hoped that he would accept [some] responsibility for this or at least acknowledge what happened, but he didn’t.”

Connectedly, the documentary ended with lyrics from Daniel Farrant’s “Who’s Gonna Fix It”: Don’t you know that you gotta\Take some of the blame